nasa was able to show us this image, thanks to a new satellite equipped with something called visible infrared imaging radiometer suite. but this image of the globe from space is not what you might think it is. we do not have a camera far enough away from earth to get an image of the whole thing. it's a composite knitted together from data taken by the satellite as it made several passes around the earth. lots of the cool pictures you see like of hurricanes from earth are actually composites. anything close enough to the earth to be held by its gravitational pull is also too close to get a whole earth picture. for perspective, this is what the earth looks like from the international space station. you can't really see the whole thing at once. only a couple dozen earthlings have ever been far enough from the earth to see the whole thing. like the crew of apollo 8, who took this picture commonly known as "earth rise" from the window of the craft as they orbited the moon in 1968. unfortunately, nearly half the earth was in shadow. an unmanned soviet spacecraft called zond 7 got this shot